WD Red Pro 6 TB Review - High Performance NAS HDD Gets a Capacity Bump
by Ganesh T S on September 7, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- Storage
- HDDs
- Western Digital
Performance - Raw Drives
Prior to evaluating the performance of the drives in a NAS environment, we wanted to check up on the best-case performance by connecting one of them directly to a SATA 6 Gbps port. Using HD Tune Pro 5.50, we ran a number of tests on a raw drives. The following screenshots present the results for the WD Red Pro. Corresponding images for similar drives that have been evaluated previously are also provided in the drop-down box for easy comparison.
Sequential Reads
Sequential Writes
Random Reads
Random Writes
Miscellaneous Reads
Miscellaneous Writes
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Samus - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
At the current rate, it'll be only a few years before NAND hits parity with magnetic storage in capacity and price.3D (verticle) NAND and Intel's 3D X-Point are going to revolutionize storage as we know it.
X-Point will slowly make NAND a cheap commodity for the consumer sector (abandoned by the enterprise sector for X-Point) and NAND will be so cheap to produce by that point (it's 30 year old technology) that it'll be the common medium. It has already killed virtually every other form of portable storage (floppy disks, tapes, CD/DVD/Bluray, etc) with the only worthy exception being large capacity (2-4TB) 2.5" portable hard disks. It's only a matter of time before 4TB SSD's cost nearly the same as 4TB hard disks, and hard disk platter density is already hit some physical barriers, hence the need for shingled recording and other reliability/performance sacrifices.
But even then, soon,
Souka - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link
SSDs aren't for NAS due to pricingIf you put a SSD in, many of the charts would be unreadable due to scaling issues.
Also, if the NAS is used for large number of writes, the SSD reliability would be a factor
melgross - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link
Reliability would not be a factor. Large financial institutions are using them for transaction processing, and few things require more write reliability than that.FunBunny2 - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
The advantage of SSD is, according to legend at least, a more consistent life time: just retire them at x% of warranty, less infant mortality and random death (getting run over by a bus, in human terms).MrSpadge - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link
The strong DAS performance bodes well for the new 6 TB Black model, which is probably physically similar but with different firmware settings.Wwhat - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link
Why is the article listing the WD red pro with the addition 'star NAS'? Since when is WD using the 'star' term? I can't imagine them doing so, and especially see a company market something with 'red star' these days :)A quick web search shows only anadtech adds 'star' the the name.
Morawka - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link
disappointing performance. basically every other nas drive on the market is faster than these. HGST and Seagate dominating.star-affinity - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
According to the benchmarks in this article – as a DAS drive the WD Red Pro seems nice – but it for some reason seems not as good when used as a NAS drive, agreed on that.Arbie - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link
We want eight and we won't wait.Gigaplex - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link
Colour me disappointed that there is no analysis of acoustic behaviour. My NAS is by far the loudest device in my room due to the 4 WD Red (non pro) drives in it, and they're supposed to be one of the quietest drives available.